I was born in Poonch (Kashmir) and now I live in Norway. I oppose war and violence and am a firm believer in the peaceful co-existence of all nations and peoples. In my academic work I have tried to espouse the cause of the weak and the oppressed in a world dominated by power politics, misleading propaganda and violations of basic human rights. I also believe that all conscious members of society have a moral duty to stand for and further the cause of peace and human rights throughout the world.

Thursday, June 26, 2014

Remarks on science and scientific thinking

Nasir Khan, June 26, 2014

When did ‘science’ start in human
history? And when did the ‘scientific thinking’ start? These seemingly
simple questions can only be answered by a historian of science who has
acquaintance with historical data relating to the
issues. In other words, to find an answer we need the expertise of
specialists. However, we should keep in mind that science is not any
static body of knowledge but rather an active process through the ages.

Man’s use
of his near environment and his attempts to understand the phenomenon
around him goes back to the times when he started to use his hands and
much later in the history of his social evolution he started to use
stones and flint, for instance, to hunt and skin off the animals for
food and clothing. That is the time when man started to affect his near
environment intentionally that was primarily to meet his practical needs
for his survival. These can be called man’s first steps towards
‘science’ in a general sense.

But the
question of scientific thinking has a dialectical relationship with
man’s relationship with nature as he started to form some ideas about
how things work. These were his early steps towards understanding how
things worked. That process has gone on in history for long. What we
associate with scientific thinking’ in contrast to idealistic,
speculative and mythical thinking (eventually becoming religious thinking)
belongs to the period after the Renaissance. But to a historian
of ideas and science any such periodization is only for our convenience,
not for its historical accuracy.